Doh!: Mixed Emotions and The Gamer Extraordinaire (10-25 hrs.))

So I've finally made some progress on the water temple. my emotions are not complicated there is just a great many of them.

1) I am finally able to see the official hours-played tally increase. it's been stuck at 20 for a long time now. I've actually been sitting in front of this game for 25-30 hours but have had a number of mishaps. At one point I had played for a few hours and had just made it to the water temple when my mom's cat Chloe turned off the power strip that my Wii was connected to. . . doh! I was able to redo everything in a decent amount of time. but by the time that I had saved the baby fish people (called Zoras), gotten the armor that allows me to swim, traveled to a distant village to purchase underwater bombs, and made my way back down to the bottom of the lake where the water temple is, I was not in the mood to continue on. 

After having set the game down for a few days I returned again to face the water temple. I was just a little discouraged that after an hour of playing I had made little progress. The water temple is a puzzle comprised of one main room that branches off to many other smaller rooms. The main room is made up of three floors. to get from the main room to any of the other rooms Link must rotate a stair case in the center of the main room. the stair case is not a free moving object, however. it can only move to certain positions based on where you, Link, are in the room. This is a very fun puzzle to figure out. I assumed that it could be figured out systematically by moving the stair case from as many of the possible positions as I could. I found the Occoo and the map and one open door. But this didn't help me at all. The room seemed to be a dead end. So I went back to the main room to try and find a different room to enter. no luck.

I saw video clip online of Link making his way through the water temple using an item (something that looked like grappling hook) i didn't have. this was discouraging. the last item i needed was a bigger wallet and i seemed to obtain one by accident. I just so happened to walk into a building in castle town where a girl wanted an item that i had. "Perhaps," i thought, "I am just as likely to get this new item by walking around and talking to people and walking into buildings." This strategy present a plethora of new side quests for me to embark on e.g. fixing the bridge to get spring water, giving spring water to a guard to gain passage to a new part of the map, and more. If this was the way that i could get that grappling hook then i was really sunk. i have no idea how to fix the bridge, and the last time i needed to fix a bridge in this game i spent too many hours dissecting the semantics of my guide, Midna trying to find hints that didn't exist.

2) So i finally bit the bullet, and it hurt. I looked up a walk-through online. As it turns out, that grappling hook (called a claw shot) is reward for defeating a mini-boss in the water temple. and that room I thought was a dead end actually was not a dead end at all. If I had looked to the ceiling I would have seen some rock that could be shot down using my bomb-arrows to create a pathway over the wall . . . doh!

3) I hate using walkthroughs! I feel like the game beat me not the other way around. Gee writes in his final chapter about how he used a cheat just to get him to a point in Half-Life where his own ineptitude at jumping in the game would no longer hinder him. After this he stopped using the cheat and continued the game as normal. This is not what happened to me. The game stumped me. Rather than continue to play for endless hours looking for items in all the wrong places and running the risk of not finishing the game at all, I "cheated?". At least it felt like cheating. I didn't want to cheat. 

My thinking goes something like this. The game is consistent and complete isn't it? I shouldn't need any outside help to solve these puzzles. The game should provide me with all the necessary and sufficient information I need to progress. I don't think that me being stumped by the game is an example of the game not providing that information. But if not, why was I unable to solve the water temple?

4) I am so stoked to be past the water temple! Even though I used the walk-through beat that giant boss! I feel like gamer extraordinaire!

So Far So Good 5-10 hrs.

There have been some really awesome cut scenes. Again, I’m a little bit saddened by that fact that cut scenes can not boast the same realism that FFX seems to have in abundance. I’m also a little bit sad that their is not voice acting. I know, I know, there wasn’t supposed to be any, but I’ve already been poisoned by the FF monster from the last generation of consoles that made use of their highly brag worthy graphics.

Story line however is still very good, not great . . . yet. There is this over arching story line that has to do with Zelda and the King of twilight. That however, is not on the front of my mind as I play. I get a little more caught up in solving the puzzles and working my way through temples that I forget what the over all goal of my pursuits is. I get a few reminders every now and then that I’m looking for my friends. But now that I found my friends (except one) the same unaware feeling of no direction is looming. I’m sure I’ll get reminded as more and more cut scenes come along.

The game is fun to play to be sure. It is not the addictive kind of game i thought it would be, but it is still quite fun. My one worry about the game is its repetitiveness. This is the second time I’ve had to run around a new are collecting tears for the spirit. once i collect the tears then it’s time to be a temple. Interspersed in there is the story line, some new items, and new characters to keep things interesting. New items are my favorite.

I’ve beat the second major boss of the game, a tormented, mountain, mole creature whose chains kept him locked away until the very moment I walked in chamber. I must say that these boss battle are not that difficult at all. I am not complaining mind you, I care a little more about advancing the story than I do hours of puzzle-play, and boss battles that take 30 attempts. Long boss battles were definitely one of my major complaints with FFX. The story of FFX entranced me, but I could not advance the story after a certain point because I could not beat the bosses. Well, without the story to keep me coming back, I soon forgot about the game and never finished it even though I was over 50 hours into it and had little more than 5 hours of game play left (If i could just get passed that one boss that is).

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This second temple (of the moody mole people) is not as challenging in a way as the first temple was. This temple seemed to be about getting to the next room, that was the goal. The first temple was about scavenger hunting i.e. collecting monkies to get me to the temple boss. In this temple however, I was motivated by collecting the Bow and Arrow (which was almost exactly like the sling shot except more powerful) and getting to the next room. This section of the game so far has employed the new Iron Boots that I got. The weigh me down so that I can sink to the bottom of bodies of water (this is necessary because Link refuses to swim under water of his own volition), stand firmly against angry mole people who will roll at me and push me off ledges with out them. Also there are magnetized pathways on the roofs of the mines (the mines are the outer parts of the temple) and when I am wearing my iron boots they allow me to walk on vertical and upside down surfaces in the game.

The actual temple portion of this part of the game required me to do a little more quick jumping from ledge to ledge. If i missed a ledge then I would burn in lava. This is where I think the game suffers just a little bit. Because there are no independent camera controls (that I’ve discovered) it is hard to make sure that Link is facing the right way at the right time. I may need to jump to a ledge in one direction and then jump 90 degrees in a different direction. This is a very difficult task when I am racing against the “clock” to get to a particular place before a gate closes or what have you. I can use the Nunchuck Z button to center the camera behind me, but this is not always as efficient as I’d like it to be because Z also locks on to enemies and causes Link to strafe.

1-5 hrs.

Once I got past the fishing and few other tasks the game started to pick up a little bit.  I played for the first time as Link’s wolf form. Again, I spent the better part of fifteen minutes simply trying to find the correct place to “dig” in order to satisfy the prompts to get out of the prison cell where the Link’s wolf-form is first found. Movements and controls are more or less the same, the key difference being that in wolf form I have the ability to “sense”. As far as I can tell so far, “sense” is simply the ability to see items buried in the ground such as hearts and rupees.

Once I completed the short, story-based tutorial for the wolf, part of the plot was revealed. Princess Zelda’s thrown room was invaded by soldiers from the “King of Twilight”. Faced with choosing for the people of Hyrule immediate death or life in twilight. She chose life. “Twilight” (which is referred to more as a substance than as a particular time of day) descended upon Hyrule and when it did, all of its subjects, save Zelda, were transformed unwittingly into spirit form.

This is the section of the game that allows me to really get a handle on playing in Link’s wolf form. Lot’s of platforming and Wiimote swinging.

So I’m transformed back into wolf and have to gather some items in the village. The final thing that I have to gather is a bridge. I had come to a particular clearing and need to walk across this chasm, but apparently, evil twilight creatures have, in all their mischievousness, stolen the bridge that connects to the ends of the chasm.  Not only was it weird and  sort of out of place that I needed to find a bridge, I couldn’t tell if Midna was trying to give me a hint as to where it was. He kept asking if there was a place where I remember the bridge being (I had no clue) and then he would ask if there was anyplace that “grabs you”.

That “grabs you” line was a very difficult line for me to interpret. I wasn’t sure if game was trying direct me someplace or if it was just a fluke. Now, anytime I pass into an area that is covered in twilight and giant shadow-like hand reaches and literally grabs me to take me across the border. Was it the case that Midna was trying to tell me that it was near a twilight covered area? In short, no. The “grabs you line was completely irrelevant and I was simply thinking far too deeply about it. Nevertheless I spent a good two hours over the course of two days looking for the bridge.